Film Review: Devil Seed (2012)

Alexandra is a lively college student returning to live with her roommates Jessica and Breanne after the summer holidays. After a night of drinking, Alex agrees to a psychic reading to learn about her future with her boyfriend, Brian, but during the reading a dramatic turn of events causes SOMETHING to go drastically wrong.

REVIEW:

Growing up, there were only three films that scared the crap out of me. Today, I still find two of them to be perfect examples of the genre (“Poltergeist” and the original “The Amityville Horror”), but only one can still make my skin crawl. It still makes me feel uneasy and there is no way in hell I would go into a darkened room after watching “The Exorcist”. Next year the film will be 40 years old and the sheer power of that film to this day has never been rivaled. And over those years there have been countless imitations that never even come close to matching the heart and darkness of it. So when I sat down to watch “Devil Seed”, the comparisons are obvious and blatant. It is a predictable imitation set within the college set instead of a young girl. It’s a B-movie exploitation version that offers a few solid fright scenes thrown in to a VERY familiar story.

Alex (Michelle Argyris) is a college student who along with her friend Jessica (Shantelle Canzanese) and frenemy Breanne (Vanessa Broze) move in to a new home together. After a night out on the town, Alex and Jessica visit a psychic that unknowingly unleashes a vicious spirit that inhabits Alex’s body. Things begin to get strange for her immediately when televisions and books have minds of their own. Things quickly escalate when marks begin to appear on her body caused by this unseen force. No one wants to believe what she does and is quick to blame the boyfriend. There seems like nothing can be done until Jessica gets Professor Madison (Wayne Conroy) to try and help. When he realizes that he is in over his head, he enlists the help of his own father who knows a thing or two about demons.

I really hate to say that “Devil Seed” aka “The Devil In Me” is a blatant ripoff of “The Exorcist” but sometimes the truth stings. It’s more of an exploitation version but a ripoff nonetheless. I have no problem admitting that there were a handful of creepy scenes, its’ just that the bad outweighs the good 10 to 1. I would say that there were no surprises but that’s not entirely true. When the filmmaker tries to mimic the pissing scene from “The Exorcist”, there is a nice twist that caught me off guard. When we first see the fully possessed Regan, we were frightened to no end by that makeup job. Here, it was just blah. There is no denying that Michelle Argyris is one very sexy young lady and it may be a bit difficult to make her creepy looking but I find it hard to believe that they couldn’t have done a better job on her makeup than they did.

The film also drags out a little too long. We hear too much talking about what is happening to her over and over again. Is she crazy or not, who cares. Trim the fat and maybe this would have been a better experience than it ended up being. The acting was good for a B-movie so growing to care about any of these characters is practically an impossibility.

Though there are several moments that work, most either don’t or we have seen them before. So recommending “Devil Seed” is going to be tough. On the one hand, if you like possession films, then you may find a thing or two to enjoy. If you want to be scared, just skip it. You will already know how everything plays out and it was done WAY BETTER forty years ago. There is far more skin and deaths in this one than “The Exorcist”, but the terror quotient is missing. I think I will be kind and give the film ** (out of 5) just because there were two or three moments that were a tad creepy and who doesn’t like watching sexy college coeds anyways.